The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (review)

180 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION analysis of narrative voice and an examination of the key articulative terms mais and cependant, Robinson reveals the carefully constructed narrative and temporal ambiguities woven into a mythic framework of nature, culture, and sexuality. A study of interest to historians of the book as well as to Prévost scholars, Jean Sgard's "Les Figures de Manon Lescaut en 1753" gives detailed descriptions of the eight illustrations, by Pasquier and Gravelot, for the elegant revised edition of Manon. Sgard points out how the choice and style of illustrations, like certain operatic adaptations of Manon, are designed to de-emphasize social content and underscore the sentimental love story. Interesting as a lesson on eighteenthcentury book design, the article also illuminates aspects of Manon's reception by the reading public. Philip Stewart considers "Body language in La Religieuse." This computer assisted study (making use ofthe ARTFL database from the University of Chicago) shows how a quantitative study can help refine and strengthen readerly intuitions. In this case, Stewart's intuitions concern the erotic valorization of certain lexical items in the Saint-Eutrope section of Diderot's novel. He discovers some striking features of this "body language" and his general comments on the quantitative investigation of literary texts are lucid and interesting. Contributions to the volume from other fields include articles by Sheila Bell and Brian Nicholas on Flaubert, William Bell and Roisin Mallaghan on Roger Martin du Gard, Robert Dawson on a set of early seventeenth-century love letters , Robert Gibson on Victor Hugo, Robert Lethbridge on Maupassant, Valerie Minogue on Genet, Norma Rinsler on Fromentin, Philip Thody on Proust and Anthony Powell, George Watson on storytelling and "the sense of unending," and Keith Wren on George Sand. Julie Candler Hayes University of Richmond Wayne C. Booth. The Company We Keep: An Ethics ofFiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. xii + 557pp. In this stout, prolix book, Wayne C. Booth plumps for pluralism plus active virtue, ethical verdicts. As social creatures, he claims, we are only what texts open the chance for us to be. Among the most powerful such texts are novels or other fictional descriptions of life. They are the company we keep and the companions we become. Nowadays, with the boom in various forms of cultural studies, this position hardly needs defence for most of us. What Booth tries to do is reconcile it and the intellectual Old Guard, who long paid nostalgic homage to its Johnsonian REVIEWS 181 or Arnoldian forms, but who themselves kept to aestheticizing and historicizing bromides. He counts as allies not Foucault or Habermas (whom he barely cites) but Arnold and Milton—since his college years, he announces tellingly at the end of the book, his Areopagitica has stayed "within reach" (p. 488). In these circumstances, novelty would be a gaffe, and in fact I cannot say that most readers will learn a lot from these half-a-thousand pages. Booth has the skill to keep those readers entertained, however, and therefore immersed at length in unfashionable doctrine. Perhaps inveterate formalists will defrost, for time is a habituating pedagogue. Others of the Old Guard will find with relief that this clear, pleasant, homestyle, familiar book is 1980s' comfort food, ready to soothe those whose guts grow queasy with nouvelle théorie, the concoction of "so many mandarin critics writ[ing] so many polysyllables intelligible to so few" (p. 267). (Booth's sometime trouble reading Ulysses does not make him snipe, with equal justice, at the mandarin Joyce [274ff.].) Except as a cultural phenomenon itself, The Company We Keep has more affective than intellectual interest. Instead of the kind of cognitive work done by cultural studies, in testing and weighing social forms against an egalitarian, spontaneous ideal of "communitas" (Victor Turner's term), Booth tries to offer an image of "communitas" through a friendship between implied author and implied reader. To (re)anthropomorphize the implied author, whom one might rather consider as a textual function or a placeholder, like the public vendor (a chef) of the first chapter of Tom Jones, is to return to the "humanism" that most ethical critics treat suspiciously and believe that they disbelieve in. Unlike post...